German national data portal launched

20 February 2013 saw the launch of the German national data portal. While the portal had been longtime expected, in the last days before the launch the German open data community has been vocal in its criticism of the introduction of a newly created national license framework, which includes the option to limit re-use to non-commercial use forms.

The portal will also hold non-open data as well as data in closed formats. This in the expectation that once data is published in some shape or form the pressure on the data holder will rise to provide the data as really open data as well.

The platform is created under the responsibility of the German Ministry for the Interior (BMI) and was built by Fraunhofer FOKUS. At launch the platform contains a few thousand data sets, mostly under a license only requiring attribution of the source. The license is a new German national license. Read the full report here: http://epsiplatform.eu/content/german-national-data-portal-launched.